Sample Lesson

From the book: Hygeia - Nutrition and Physiology

Hygeia - Nutrition and Physiology

Topic: A Few Facts about American Nutrition

In this lesson, the teacher will present
some of these startling facts listed ahead that can be elaborated upon and
discussed. If you are not already aware of these facts, hopefully, it will
make your hair stand on end. Try to put these facts together in a way that
leads the student to see correlations. In other words, each bulleted fact
should tell us something about preferences, eating habits, health, the food
industry, etc. This lesson could be prefaced with a summary retelling of
Morgan Spurlock’s experiment in the movie Super Size Me.

Morgan Spurlock wanted to test the effects
on the average American of eating a diet strictly from the McDonald’s menu.
In order to monitor the effects of this food upon his health so he employed
three doctors, a cardiologist, a gastro-intestinal specialist, and a general
practitioner, as well as a registered nutritionist, to monitor the progressive
state of his health. When his experiment began, Morgan, a tall, thin 6 ft.
1 inch young man was a fit 186 pounds with a mere 11% body fat. He walked
several miles each day and worked out at the gym several times per week.
The three doctors concurred that he was in excellent health.

He set the following conditions for himself
for 30 consecutive days:

1. He could only eat from the McDonald’s menu
and must sample every item on the menu at least once.

2. He had to eat three times a day from McDonald’s:
breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

3. He had to “super-size” his menu item whenever the employee taking his order asked if he wanted to.

4. Since 60 % of Americans get little exercise,
he had to eliminate his exercise routine and limit his walking to less than
5000 steps per day.

Thus began the daily onslaught of 64-ounce
coca-colas, double cheeseburgers, Big Macs, super-sized fries, egg McMuffins,
and quarter-pounders. The “premium salad” was no relief from the assault
of fat and sugar: with the included dressing, it contains more fat than the
Big Mac. The results were outrageous as well as frightening. Within five
days, his weight had shot up to 194 pounds; by the twelfth day, he weighed
in at 203 pounds. On his McDonald’s diet, he was gaining almost one and a
half pounds per day! After this 203 pound weigh in, the nutritionist convinced
him to substitute water for the cola. This simple substitution had the effect
of leveling off the rate of weight gain, but overall, after 30 days, Morgan
had gained 24 Ω pounds—still dangerously close to a pound per day of weight
gain. In his after word, Morgan confessed that it took more than six weeks
of diet and exercise to get close to his original weight before he engaged
in the “experiment,” and the last four or five pounds, from 190 down to the
original 186, took nearly six months to lose.

However, what was most compelling in showing
the correlation between a diet high in fat, sugar, and high fructose corn
syrup, was Morgan’s state of health monitored by the physicians. Within 30
days, he had consumed 30 pounds of sugar and 12 pounds of fat. His body fat
went from 11% to 18 %, and his cholesterol went up by 65 points. Within one
short month, he had effectively doubled his risk for heart disease. Midway
through the experiment, he began to suffer from shortness of breath and often
awakened in the middle of the night with heart palpitations. A chronic depression
began to settle into his state of being that was alleviated only when he was
eating the McDonald’s meals. The physicians detected a sclerosis and hardening
of the arteries and liver along with fatty deposits that increased at such
shocking rates that they were astounded: the liver damage resembled that of
a chronic alcoholic. By the end of the second week the doctors were so alarmed
that they strongly recommended that Morgan end the experiment immediately
and feared a collapse or breakdown that would require immediate hospitalization.

Eating Habits

· Each day, one out of four Americans consumes a meal from a
fast food restaurant.

· Forty percent of an American family’s meals are away from home
at restaurants and fast food businesses.

· The typical American consumes three hamburgers and four orders
of French fries every week. This is only a portion of the weekly fast-food
consumption of items such as chicken, pizza, tacos, etc.

· The McDonald’s corporation takes in 43 % of the total annual
sales of the fast food market.

The Flavor of Foods

· 90% of the money Americans spend on food is used to buy processed
foods. Stroll the isles of any supermarket and you will find few examples
of non-manufactured or non-processed food.

This simple fact has spawned a tremendous
background industry known as the flavor industry. The techniques of processing
food tend to destroy flavor, the food produced is generally a blank canvas
with little taste upon which the flavor industry paints its tang and zest.
it is the “natural flavor” and “artificial flavor” concocted in chemical laboratories
that provide most manufactured food with taste. A “natural flavor” is not
necessarily healthier or less processed than an artificial flavor. Consider
the following quote from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

"A natural flavor,"
says Terry Acree, a professor of food science at Cornell University, "is
a flavor that's been derived with an out-of-date technology." Natural
flavors and artificial flavors sometimes contain exactly the same chemicals,
produced through different methods. Amyl acetate, for example, provides the
dominant note of banana flavor. When it is distilled from bananas with a solvent,
amyl acetate is a natural flavor. When it is produced by mixing vinegar with
amyl alcohol and adding sulfuric acid as a catalyst, amyl acetate is an artificial
flavor. Either way it smells and tastes the same.”

For your information, and to drive home the
point about the taste of manufactured foods concocted in the laboratory, consider
how the following ingredients are used in a strawberry shake from Burger King.
These chemicals in combination create the illusion of the flavor of a strawberry;
there is another list for the milk, cream, sugar, etc.:

· In recent decades, America has become the fattest nation in
the world. This means that this nation has the highest percentage of its
population overweight and obese in comparison to all other countries in the
world. More than 100 million Americans are overweight or obese. The current
population of the United States (2007) is a little more than 300 million.
That is a ratio of 1 out of every 3 people who are obese.

· Since 1980 the obesity rate in America has doubled.

According to the U. S. Department of Health
Center for Disease Prevention and Control, the obesity rate among adults aged
20-74 was 15 % in 1980. The rate of obesity among the same age adults in
years 2003-4, shows an increase to 32.9%.

The statistics from the American Heart Association
show a similar trend. In 1960-62, 10.7% of adult men and 15.7 % of adult
women in America were obese. In 2001-2004, 30.2 % of adult men and 34 % of
adult women were obese.

· Statistics tracking current trends show that four out of five
children (80%) who become obese by the age of 13 will also be obese as adults.

· One out of every three children born in the year 2000 will
develop Type 2 Adult Onset Diabetes !!!

One must consider that this statistic is
also applicable to every year of birth following the year 2000, Type 2 Adult
Onset Diabetes is not a genetic disease, it is one brought on, typically,
by an overweight or obese condition, lack of exercise, and a diet rich in
sugar and carbohydrates (soda-pop, candy, snack food, and fast food). It
is a preventable disease.

Lesson Activities

A supplement to this lesson would be to view
the movie (available in DVD) called Super Size Me. Look also at the
Bonus Materials on the disc where a demonstration was performed. The French
fries were kept in a glass jar for two months and did not decompose.

The student can write some of the facts listed
from American Eating Habits and Obesity and Health (in the section above)
into the main lesson book.

The student should record the reactions to
Spurlock’s movie Super Size Me. This could be a short opinion composition
of two paragraphs that will be recorded in the main lesson book.

Research Activity

In order to convince oneself that most manufactured
food derives its taste not from the food but from chemical additives, one
may want to do some follow up research on the Flavor Industry. For example
a brief investigation of the science of flavors shows the following list of
a few of the flavor impact groups. The flavorists begin with
this basic palette and then add nuances and subtleties to give an initial
impact, “leveling-off” taste, aftertaste, etc.